Chicken

March 16, 2009

I'm not a Caesar Salad kind of girl. I don't like crutons (I know, I know! Who am I???). I hate creamy dressings. I prefer my salad under dressed, and am the typical New York City "dressing on the side" kind of girl.

But something in me changed when I saw an episode of Jamie Oliver at Home. In it, Jamie took the crusty old Caesar salad to a whole new level. You won't find any dry old chicken breast, clunky dressing, or crusty crutons in this salad. Oh no. Here, Jaime roasts chicken legs on top of torn up ciabatta bread (which creates the most wonderful, flavorful cruton you will ever taste), a proper caesar salad dressing (with anchovies! Don't be scared!), lots of rosemary, and some pancetta (I used bacon) to round it all out.

What you get is an unbelievably dynamic and rustic Caesar salad. Moist chicken, smoky flavors from the pancetta (bacon), crutons that are both crisp and moist at the same time and packed with flavor, and an deliciously flavorful dressing that amps up the entire experience.

You have not lived until you have eaten this salad. Seriously. Everything up until this point has been a dream. You're actually not even reading this post right now.

Place the chicken legs in a snug-fitting roasting pan with the pieces of torn-up bread. Sprinkle with the chopped rosemary, drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Mix with your hands to make sure everything is well coated, then lift the chicken legs up to the top, so they sit above the bread. This way, the bread will soak up all the lovely juices from the chicken, giving you the best croutons! Pop the pan into the preheated oven.

After 45 minutes the chicken should be nicely cooked. Take the pan out of the oven, drape the pancetta or bacon over the chicken and croutons, and put back for another 15 to 20 minutes for everything to crisp up. The chicken legs are ready when you can pinch the meat off the bone easily. When they're cooked, remove the pan from the oven and set it aside for the chicken to cool down slightly.

Pound the garlic and anchovy fillets in a pestle and mortar or a Flavor Shaker until you have a pulp. Scrape into a bowl and whisk in the Parmesan, creme fraiche, lemon juice and 3 times as much extra-virgin olive oil as lemon juice. Season dressing, to taste, with salt and pepper.

Pull the chicken meat off the leg bones - you can use 2 forks to do this, or your hands if you're tough like me - and tear it up roughly with the croutons and the bacon. Wash, spin dry and separate the lettuce leaves, tear them up and toss with the chicken, croutons, bacon and creamy, cheesy dressing. Scatter with some Parmesan shavings.

March 12, 2009

I must say that I am a very lucky girl. That beautiful dish
you see above is courtesy of my boyfriend, Jack.He is, by all accounts, a fantastic cook.I almost can attribute my love of
cooking to him – but I won’t because he’ll gloat and rub it in.But frankly, before I met Jack, my idea
of a good meal was one piece of turkey and one piece of American cheese on dry
whole wheat bread… with relish.I
never knew the wonders of simple flavors, like salt or lemon zest, that
heighten the flavor of a dish, or the earthy taste of rosemary, the “foresty”
(Jack’s adjective) scent of thyme, the wonders of roasted garlic, or the
sweetness of sautéed onions.

I just finished reading Molly Wizenberg’s (Orangette) book,A Homemade Life(buy it -seriously).In the book, she mentions that her boyfriend at the time
(now her husband), Brandon, is the more experimental cook of the two.Where Molly is “hunched over a
cookbook, hanging on every word, he’s at the stove with his fingers in the
pot.”If I weren’t paying attention,
I would have thought Molly was talking about Jack and me. There were many times
I would read this book and smile, thinking of Jack. I must admit, I sometimes
envy his ability to pick up a few ingredients and create something without
relying on a recipe, but at the same time, it inspires me to think off the page
and trust my instincts.

Sometimes, he’ll work with a recipe to learn about the
flavors and then the next time, he’ll wing it, eyeing measurements and adding
his own spices and touches.His mind
is always churning.We both
absolutely love Alice Water’s the Art of Simple Food, because her recipes are a
canvas to make it your own. If my boyfriend does work with a recipe, it is from
her book.Her recipes are like
color by numbers – there is a guideline, but no one is forcing you to color
within the lines.

Just so he doesn’t get a big ego, I tell him the food sucks,
because I’m a big baby.He often
knows I’m lying from the smile that I try desperately to hide, the sighs that
leave my lips, and the clean plate that sits in front of me.

The fact of the matter is I’m a better cook.So there.

EDITOR'S NOTE:After writing this post, I asked my boyfriend to read it, thinking that
he’d appreciate my acknowledgement of his talents in the kitchen.He instead edited my post as if he were
Editor-in-Chief of Random House and then proceeded to tell me I know nothing
about ingredients.

Season the chicken a few hours before with salt and freshly
ground black pepper.Heat a heavy
bottom pan over medium heat.Add
olive oil and place the chicken legs into the pan skin side down and cook until
crisp and brown, about 12 minutes.Turn and cook for another 4 minutes.Remove the chicken an add onions.Cook until translucent, about 5 minutes.Add the garlic, rosemary, and bay
leaves and cook for 2 minutes. Deglaze with white wine, scraping up brown bits
from the bottom of the pan.Add
tomatoes and cook for an additional 5 minutes.

Arrange the chicken in the pan, skin side up, and pour in
any juices that have collected.Pour in chicken broth.The
liquid should reach halfway up the chicken; add more if needed. Bring to a boil
and turn down to a simmer.Cover
and cook at a bare simmer or in a 325 degree F oven for 45 minutes.When done, pour the braising liquid
into a bowl and skim the fat.Discard the bay leaves and rosemary stems.Taste for salt and adjust as needed.

For the Beans:Soak
beans overnight in 4 cups of water.Drain and transfer to a heavy pot.Add water to cover by 2 inches.Bring to a boil.Lower the
heat and skim off any foam.Simmer
gently for 2 hours or so, until the beans are tender.Add more water if necessary during the cooking.Season to taste with salt.

In a heavy bottomed saucepan or skillet, warm olive oil over
low heat.Add garlic and cook just
until the garlic is soft, about 2 minutes.Stir into the beans, taste for salt and adjust as
needed.Let the dish sit for a few
minutes before serving to allow the flavors to marry.

I compared it to Alice Water's Roasted Chicken, which, in true Alice Water's fashion, is much less of a hassle to make, focusing only on a few ingredients and minimal fussing (read: molesting). The result was a moist chicken with crispy skin that bursted with the flavors of thyme, rosemary, and garlic. This is, in my mind, what every roasted chicken should taste like. There was not a bite that was not packed with juices and flavors.

But I still can't figure out why this skin was so crisp, yet the other fell so limp and flat. I didn't buy this chicken a drink, either.

(By the way, if you don't own this book, I highly recommend it. Some of the best meals I have ever eaten have come from this book, and all rarely contain more than 5 or 6 ingredients and are not fussy recipes, yet are full of flavor and are completely satisfying.)

Remove the giblets from the cavity of 1 chicken weighing 3 1/2 to 4 lbs.

Remove the pads of fat inside the chicken. Tuck the wing tips up and under to keep them from burning. Season, 1 or 2 days in advance, if possible. Sprinkle inside and out with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Put a few sprigs of thyme and rosemary under the skin of the breast and thighs and within the cavity. Add a few thick slices of garlic clove under the skin.

Cover loosely and refrigerate. At least 1 hour before cooking, remove and place in a lightly oiled pan, breast side up. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Roast for 20 minutes, turn the bird breast side down, and cook for another 20 minutes. The turn the breast side up again and roast until done, another 10 to 20 minutes. Let rest for 15 to 20 minutes before carving.

February 18, 2009

Inspired by Shari of Whisk: A Food Blog, I joined Whisk Wednesdays, a group made up of several fantastically wonderful, passionate women, cooking their way through Le Cordon Bleu at Home in order to save, oh, I guess $27,000 - roughly the cost of attending culinary school. So, for $20 (@$#%! I paid $50! Stupid sales that happen after I buy things), we are able to get an abridged culinary school education.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to keep up with these most dedicated women by cooking each Wednesday. Therefore, I am working my way through the book in honor of Shari and the fellow women, but slightly out of the order in which they are doing it, and in the order in which the book was printed.

I have to note that my boyfriend (who also is an avid cook, and whom I can thank for getting me into cooking, and who will be my sous chef while we work our way through the book) got in an argument as to the "correct way" to work through the book. I wanted to follow the outline that Shari has on her page, where she starts with knife skills, then to garnishes, doughs, and so on and so forth and follows in the natural order of which, I believe, culinary schools follow. He wants to do it in the way the book is printed - in three parts, ranging from basic to advanced techniques.

He won.

I'm a bit bitter, because the girl is always supposed to win. If you knew my boyfriend, though, you'd see that it is impossible to win in an argument with him. It doesn't help that he is borderline brilliant, and usually right on any topic that is brought up. And I'm glad that he doesn't keep up with reading this blog (ahem, as much as he should) unless I remind him, so he won't see that I wrote that. And I won't bother him this week about reading my posts.

Chapter One it is. I guess that the people at Le Cordon Bleu feel that roasting a chicken is, by far, the easiest cooking method there is. I mean, you throw a chicken in a roasting pan and call it a day, right?

Wrong. "Not all chickens are equal in France". Oh, really? It seems that in France, there is some type of poultry elitism takes place, and birds from Bresse, near Lyon, are the highest priced, with free-range chickens from Perigord and the Loire Valley coming in a close second. Well, I'm going to have to tell the French that the fine makers of Pepperidge Farm chicken, sold in the poultry aisle for ten bucks, are fantastically tender, and I won't have to do any plucking myself, thankyouverymuch.

Ingredients

5-pound chicken, giblets removed

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1 garlic clove, peeled

1 bay leaf

Several sprigs fresh thyme or 1/2 tsp dried

2 tbsp unsalted butter, softened

1 tbsp vegetable oil.

Start off by rinsing the chicken and then patting it dry. Then, season the cavity with salt and pepper and add the garlic and herbs. Then, truss the chicken. I followed the diagram very carefully. What seems like a very easy process is actually, quite annoying. I felt like a child trying to tie her shoe for the first time. Bunny ear, through the loop...

After the saddest trussing job known to man, in which my boyfriend and I had to use extra twine to tie the twine that was already tied together so that it would be pulled taut (that sentence made no sense and I have no interest in trying to make sense of it, since I don't understand it myself), we proceeded rub the chicken down with butter. I mean, rub it down. What we did to that chicken was illegal in 38 states. That butter never seemed to end. It just lasted and lasted. After 10 minutes of molesting this poor bird carcass with butter, I then had to rub it down with oil.

The poor chicken never knew what was coming.

The chicken then roasted for an hour on 425 degree heat - 20 minutes on one side, 20 minutes on another side, then add some water, and roast until the juices run clear when pierced, 20 minutes longer.

After removing the chicken from the pan, I finally got to cook a jus, basically a fancy French word (and seriously, what French word isn't fancy?) for juice, by cooking the particles on the top of the pan with the fat and juices in the pan. No "Gravy Master" here (sorry, Dad)! Just fat in juice!

It's kind of like the episode of Friends where Joey drinks the fat.

(And yes, I talk about Friends a lot. It's a great show, and a lot of life's lessons can be applied to an episode of Friends.)

I grabbed my butcher's knife, which I have yet to use since purchasing my set of knives several months ago. My heart always skips a beat whenever I accidentally pull the butcher knife from the block, as those knives are scary. Like, "if I accidentally drop this, I'm going to sever my foot at the ankle" scary. Like "don't even enter the kitchen while this is in my hand" scary. But I took an odd fascination with it this time around, as it was going to be put to use. So I butchered the chicken. Literally. This lesson obviously did not teach me how to carve a chicken. I swung away like John McEnroe on the tennis court (not really), with the poor, massacred chicken, my tennis ball.

The final outcome? Very tender. Very, very juicy. The jus was the most delicious jus (lets just call a spade a spade here - it is gravy) I have ever had.

But the skin was not crispy. At all. In fact, it was very limp (can you tell from the picture? Don't lie, you totally can). It was tasty, but limp.

I actually have roasted a chicken Alice Waters style (which I will write about later in the week as a comparison), and the skin was perfectly crisp and delicious. But I actually can't tell the difference as to why the Alice Waters chicken skin was so crisp, but this was so limp? Alice's chicken was just lightly brushed with oil. Was it the butter molestation? The smathering down of vegetable oil?

Was it the chicken's revenge on me for not at least buying it a drink first?

Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Place onions on a large pan; top with marinated chicken. Roast about 40 minutes, until chicken is dark red, slightly charred, and juices run clear when meat is pierced. Set aside.

Lower the oven temperature to 250 and wrap the naan bread in aluminum foil. Place the foil packet in the oven until naan is warm but not toasted, 5 to 10 minutes.

To make each sandwich, spoon 2 Tbsps. of chutney on one slice of naan, then top with 1/4 cup of spinach. Add onion slices to taste, followed by 1/4 of the chicken. Top it off with another naan slice, cut sandwich in half, and serve.